Towards a new video compression scheme using super-resolution

The term super-resolution is typically used in the literature to describe the process of obtaining a high resolution (HR) image or a sequence of HR images from a set of low resolution (LR) observations. This term has been applied primarily to spatial and temporal resolution enhancement. However, intentional pre-processing and downsampling can be applied during encoding and super-resolution techniques to upsample the image can be applied during decoding when video compression is the main objective. In this paper we consider the following three video compression models. The first one simply compresses the sequence using any of the available standard compression methods, the second one pre-processes (without downsampling) the image sequence before compression, so that post-processing (without upsampling) is applied to the compressed sequence. The third model includes downsampling in the pre-processing stage and the application of a super resolution technique during decoding. In this paper we describe these three models but concentrate on the application of super-resolution techniques as a way to post-process and upsample a compressed video sequences. Experimental results are provided on a wide range of bitrates for two very important applications: format conversion between different platforms and scalable video coding.